“Just One More Book”
A few months ago, I had several conversations with a friend who was trying to decide whether to retire after years of professional practice. He spent a lot of time researching whether to retire, when to retire, and what he would do after retiring.
When I first talked with him, he already had a list of 10 books about retirement he planned to read during his vacation, after which he hoped he’d be able to decide.
As he dug into his research prior to the vacation, he kept finding new topics and questions, which led to even more research. The problem wasn’t that he had too little information. He had too many options.
But the real problem was that deciding to retire was more emotional than factual.
The Gap Isn’t Informational — It’s Emotional
Intelligent professionals are wired to research before making decisions, and often that works fine, especially when it’s a fact-based decision. However, when approaching retirement, they often don’t realize this is more of an emotional issue than a factual one.
Dan Haylett is a retirement expert who has coached many couples and individuals struggling with a retirement decision. He’s seen how ineffective it is to research an emotional issue. Writing in The Retirement Fix, dated May 24, 2026, he says:
“The gap between having enough information to make a good decision and actually making the decision isn’t an information gap; it’s an emotional one.”
The decision-making part of the brain doesn’t run on facts, which is why “Just Get More Data” never closes the gap. As James Clear wrote in Atomic Habits:
“Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level. Whatever your logical reasons are for taking action, you only feel compelled to act on them because of emotion.”
Facts can shape a decision, but emotions often drive it.
When Research Starts Working Against You
More options don’t produce clarity. In fact, they produce paralysis and second-guessing.
While my friend was in research mode, he kept changing his mind because there were so many options and so many more things he could research and read. One option would be a reason in favor of retiring, while another would be to keep working.
Retirement coach Dan Haylett commented on the negative effects of too much information in The Retirement Fix dated May 24, 2026:
“And here’s where it gets worse — beyond a certain point, more information doesn’t just fail to help, it actively makes things worse. It creates anxiety rather than reducing it.”
Researchers have long understood that having more options doesn’t make decisions easier. It makes them more difficult. As Anne-Laure Le Cunff noted in her Ness Labs newsletter, The Art of Good Enough,
“We’ve all been there: you’re about to make a decision, but somehow the more you research, the harder it becomes to choose.”
I tried to impress on my friend that continual research would never lead him to a 100% certain conclusion. Whatever conclusion he reached would always be, at best, a probability.
At first, it just made him do more research, trying to figure out the probabilities down to the percentage point. Eventually, he understood that whatever information he had, there was never going to be any certainty. He would have to just make a decision.
The Fear Hiding Underneath the Spreadsheets
Fear and uncertainty are why we delay retirement decisions and focus on endless research instead. We fear making the wrong decision, and we’re uncertain whether to retire at all or what retirement will look like.
Our brain avoids the emotional work because uncertainty registers as danger. As Dan Haylett wrote in The Retirement Fix dated March 22, 2026 :
“Our brains hate uncertainty — like properly hate it. Uncertainty feels dangerous because for most of human history uncertainty meant actual physical danger.”
Some people, when approaching a retirement decision, know they are ready to retire, despite the uncertainty. It’s just a question of whether the finances will allow it.
That was the case for my wife and me. I did some research about retirement before we retired, but it wasn’t to decide whether to retire. It was rather to give me some ideas about what retirement might be like.
Other people seem more inclined to worry more about the retirement decision itself. It seems counterintuitive that financially independent professionals, the people most able to retire, often worry the most because they’re free to worry about everything beyond the money, especially what is involved in giving up their professional identity.
Enough Research. Make the Call.
People who retire well aren’t the ones who did the most research and came to the factual conclusion that it was time to retire. Instead, as Dan Haylett wrote in The Retirement Fix on May 24, 2026,
“The people who successfully retire aren’t the ones with the most information — they’re the ones who’ve accepted uncertainty and made the decision anyway. They’ve done enough research to know the numbers work, then they’ve addressed the emotional barriers rather than trying to research those away too.”
It’s fine to do your due diligence and make sure you can retire financially. However, no amount of research will resolve the emotions of fear and uncertainty that you feel surrounding a retirement decision.
At some point, you have to acknowledge your fear and uncertainty and make a decision. You can’t resolve this by doing more research.
As popular author Mel Robbins wrote in The Let Them Theory:
“You’ll never feel ready to change your life. One day, you just get tired of your own excuses and force yourself to do it.”
Stop trying to research your way out of fear. Name it, sit with it, and make the call.
You Already Know Enough
If you’re honest with yourself, you probably crossed the “enough information” line a while ago. Everything since has been the fear talking.
So here’s the challenge: name the specific thing you’re afraid of, write it down in one sentence, and acknowledge it.
The decision was never going to come from the reading. It was always going to come from you.
You don’t need to feel certain. You just need to be willing to act without certainty, the way every meaningful decision in your life has already required.
Note: I wrote this blog post myself using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images and text improvements.
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